The HalfLifers exhume cinema’s favorite incarnation of mindless, decaying mortality, the Zombie, in the hopes of breathing new life into this misunderstood figure. From a panel discussion in an old TV studio to a quarantined helicopter high above California’s rolling hills, these life-challenged entities walk, talk, and chew over some of the more difficult questions of this “whole linear birth-death system."
This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.
HalfLifers is an ongoing collaborative project created by longtime friends Torsten Zenas Burns and Anthony Discenza. Burns received his BFA in Media Art from New York State College of Art & Design at Alfred University in 1990, and an MFA in Performance and Video from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993. He currently resides in Holyoke, MA. Anthony Discenza received a BFA in studio art from Wesleyan University in 1990, and an MFA in video from C.C.A.C. in 2000. He currently resides in Oakland, CA.
The HalfLifers create videotapes and installations exploring speculative fictions including zombie relationships, rescue rituals and re-imagined slapstick. Their sculptural installation projects and looping projections have shown at Smackmellon Gallery in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, and at the DiRosa's Gatehouse Gallery in California. Single-channel works, including the Rescue, Action, Island, Pioneer and Afterlifers series' have screened at the Museum of Modern Art in NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art in NY, Catherine Clark Gallery in CA, the New York Video Festival, Video_Dumbo in NY, Chicago Underground Film Festival in IL, Pacific Film Archive in CA, Impakt Festival (Netherlands), European Media Arts Festival (Germany), Pleasuredome in Canada. Their work was included in the book, Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the Bay Area, 1945 - 2000.